Keira Knightley Reveals Her Girl Crush

by Antoinette Bueno
12:47 PM PDT, July 11, 2014

Getty Images

Keira Knightley recently spoke to The Advocate to promote her new film Begin Again, in which she stars as a struggling singer-songwriter opposite Mark Ruffalo and Adam Levine, when the notoriously shy British actress revealed her girl crush.

"I just watched The Punk Singer, the documentary about Kathleen Hanna from Bikini Kill, so I actually have to go with her," she shares. "She might be my top girl crush of all time, really. I love a riot grrrl."

Knightley, 29, also lets the magazine know that she's totally down for a lesbian sequel to her huge breakout 2002 film Bend It Like Beckham.

"This is the first I've heard of it, but that would've been exciting. It also would've meant a lot to so many young gay people," she says about the rumors that writer-director Gurinder Chadha originally envisioned the film as a lesbian love story between the main character Jess and her character Jules. "I'd love to see Jules and Jess get together. Hey, maybe we can do a sequel and make it happen!"

"A lot of my mum's and my dad's friends are gay, so I've been around gay men and women for as long as I can remember," she adds about her life-long support for the LGBT community. "My mum actually used to march in support of gay people in Scotland in the '60s and '70s. It's always been the complete norm for me, like a wonderful fact of life."

As for constantly taking on films about complex female relationships and sexual tension between girlfriends such as Bend It Like Beckham and 2008's The Duchess -- in which she played 18th-century English aristocrat Georgiana Cavendish, who had an intimate friendship with her husband's mistress (Hayley Atwell) -- Keira makes no apologies.

"Well, female friendships are f**king extraordinary. They don't have to be sexual to be intense love affairs," she explains. "A breakup with a female friend can be more traumatic than a breakup with a lover. I've always been attracted to stories that look at the love-hate complexity of close female friendships. It's ripe for drama."